Who controls the data the government collected from you for a generation?
Your insurance company collected data on your driving – so did your Lexus – who owns that data?
You told your doctor about controlled substances you used – and now it gets brought up in an interview.
If you can’t exclude someone from using your data, then you don’t control it. That means you really don’t own it. It’s that simple.
What does “own” mean here, let’s define the terms.
Owning the data means you can do anything you want with it – share it, sell it, mine it or build an A.I. language model with it.
From birth until the last Social Security check gets cashed, your data is collected by federal and state agencies, corporations and of course the internet.
Your teen daughter puts every waking moment on Facebook or Instagram – so who owns those hundreds of images?
TSA Pre Check, Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, government or military retirement, Tri-Care, veterans hospitals, and of course, the IRS – gather more data about every citizen than has ever been gathered in the history of mankind.
Each agency gathers different data, at different times, for slightly different purposes. And those purposes may change over time.
Who owns the rights to that data?
It’s a far stickier question than you think.
The knee jerk response is the government owns the data. They collected it for their purposes, so it’s theirs.
The government will certainly say so.
Hellbound and Down 